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Impact of Technology on

the Future of Work


Inspiration Pack

September 2014
Content

How Technology Is Destroying Jobs


MIT Technology Review, 12/06/2013

The Future of Jobs: The Onrushing Wave


The Economist, 18/01/2014

How Technology Wrecks the Middle Class


David Autor & David Dorn, NY Times, 24/08/2013

As Machines Take On More Human Work, What Is Left For Us?


Pew Research Center, 15/08/2014

Experts Have No Idea If Robots Will Steal Your Job


HBR blog, 08/08/2014

Automation Alone Is Not Killing Jobs


Tyler Cowen, NY Times, 05/04/2014

Robots Aren't the Problem: It's Us


Richard Florida, The Chronicle Review, 25/03/2013

When Robots Take All the Work, What Will Be Left for Us to Do?
Wired, 08/08/2014

All content can be found and accessed freely and publicly on the web through the sources mentioned in this
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Collected and designed by Tony Brugman (Bright & Company | HR Strategy)


Front photo by Pal Robotics SL [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons
How Technology Is Destroying Jobs
By David Rotman on June 12, 2013

Given his calm and reasoned academic demeanor, it is easy to miss just
how provocative Erik Brynjolfssons contention really is. Brynjolfsson, a
professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and his collaborator and
coauthor Andrew McAfee have been arguing for the last year and a half
that impressive advances in computer technologyfrom improved industrial
robotics to automated translation servicesare largely behind the sluggish
employment growth of the last 10 to 15 years. Even more ominous for
workers, the MIT academics foresee dismal prospects for many types of
jobs as these powerful new technologies are increasingly adopted not only
in manufacturing, clerical, and retail work but in professions such as law,
financial services, education, and medicine.

That robots, automation, and software can replace people might seem
obvious to anyone whos worked in automotive manufacturing or as a travel
agent. But Brynjolfsson and McAfees claim is more troubling and
controversial. They believe that rapid technological change has been
destroying jobs faster than it is creating them, contributing to the
stagnation of median income and the growth of inequality in the United
States. And, they suspect, something similar is happening in other
technologically advanced countries.

Perhaps the most damning piece of evidence, according to Brynjolfsson, is


a chart that only an economist could love. In economics, productivitythe
amount of economic value created for a given unit of input, such as an
hour of laboris a crucial indicator of growth and wealth creation. It is a
measure of progress. On the chart Brynjolfsson likes to show, separate
lines represent productivity and total employment in the United States. For
years after World War II, the two lines closely tracked each other, with
increases in jobs corresponding to increases in productivity. The pattern is
clear: as businesses generated more value from their workers, the country
as a whole became richer, which fueled more economic activity and created
even more jobs. Then, beginning in 2000, the lines diverge; productivity
continues to rise robustly, but employment suddenly wilts. By 2011, a
significant gap appears between the two lines, showing economic growth
with no parallel increase in job creation. Brynjolfsson and McAfee call it the
great decoupling. And Brynjolfsson says he is confident that technology is
behind both the healthy growth in productivity and the weak growth in jobs.

Its a startling assertion because it threatens the faith that many


economists place in technological progress. Brynjolfsson and McAfee still
believe that technology boosts productivity and makes societies wealthier,
but they think that it can also have a dark side: technological progress is
eliminating the need for many types of jobs and leaving the typical worker
worse off than before. Brynjolfsson can point to a second chart indicating
that median income is failing to rise even as the gross domestic product
soars. Its the great paradox of our era, he says. Productivity is at record
levels, innovation has never been faster, and yet at the same time, we have
a falling median income and we have fewer jobs. People are falling behind
because technology is advancing so fast and our skills and organizations
arent keeping up.

Brynjolfsson and McAfee are not Luddites. Indeed, they are sometimes
accused of being too optimistic about the extent and speed of recent digital
advances. Brynjolfsson says they began writing Race Against the Machine,
the 2011 book in which they laid out much of their argument, because they
wanted to explain the economic benefits of these new technologies
(Brynjolfsson spent much of the 1990s sniffing out evidence that
information technology was boosting rates of productivity). But it became
clear to them that the same technologies making many jobs safer, easier,
and more productive were also reducing the demand for many types of
human workers.
Anecdotal evidence that digital technologies threaten jobs is, of course,
everywhere. Robots and advanced automation have been common in many
types of manufacturing for decades. In the United States and China, the
worlds manufacturing powerhouses, fewer people work in manufacturing
today than in 1997, thanks at least in part to automation. Modern
automotive plants, many of which were transformed by industrial robotics
in the 1980s, routinely use machines that autonomously weld and paint
body partstasks that were once handled by humans. Most recently,
industrial robots like Rethink Robotics Baxter (see The Blue-Collar Robot,
May/June 2013), more flexible and far cheaper than their predecessors,
have been introduced to perform simple jobs for small manufacturers in a
variety of sectors. The website of a Silicon Valley startup called Industrial
Perception features a video of the robot it has designed for use in
warehouses picking up and throwing boxes like a bored elephant. And such
sensations as Googles driverless car suggest what automation might be
able to accomplish someday soon.

A less dramatic change, but one with a potentially far larger impact on
employment, is taking place in clerical work and professional services.
Technologies like the Web, artificial intelligence, big data, and improved
analyticsall made possible by the ever increasing availability of cheap
computing power and storage capacityare automating many routine tasks.
Countless traditional white-collar jobs, such as many in the post office and
in customer service, have disappeared. W. Brian Arthur, a visiting
researcher at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Centers intelligence systems lab
and a former economics professor at Stanford University, calls it the
autonomous economy. Its far more subtle than the idea of robots and
automation doing human jobs, he says: it involves digital processes talking
to other digital processes and creating new processes, enabling us to do
many things with fewer people and making yet other human jobs obsolete.

It is this onslaught of digital processes, says Arthur, that primarily explains


how productivity has grown without a significant increase in human labor.
And, he says, digital versions of human intelligence are increasingly
replacing even those jobs once thought to require people. It will change
every profession in ways we have barely seen yet, he warns.

McAfee, associate director of the MIT Center for Digital Business at the
Sloan School of Management, speaks rapidly and with a certain awe as he
describes advances such as Googles driverless car. Still, despite his obvious
enthusiasm for the technologies, he doesnt see the recently vanished jobs
coming back. The pressure on employment and the resulting inequality will
only get worse, he suggests, as digital technologiesfueled with enough
computing power, data, and geekscontinue their exponential advances
over the next several decades. I would like to be wrong, he says, but
when all these science-fiction technologies are deployed, what will we need
all the people for?

New Economy?

But are these new technologies really responsible for a decade of lackluster
job growth? Many labor economists say the data are, at best, far from
conclusive. Several other plausible explanations, including events related to
global trade and the financial crises of the early and late 2000s, could
account for the relative slowness of job creation since the turn of the
century. No one really knows, says Richard Freeman, a labor economist at
Harvard University. Thats because its very difficult to extricate the
effects of technology from other macroeconomic effects, he says. But hes
skeptical that technology would change a wide range of business sectors
fast enough to explain recent job numbers.

Employment trends have polarized the workforce and hollowed out the
middle class.

David Autor, an economist at MIT who has extensively studied the


connections between jobs and technology, also doubts that technology
could account for such an abrupt change in total employment. There was
a great sag in employment beginning in 2000. Something did change, he
says. But no one knows the cause. Moreover, he doubts that productivity
has, in fact, risen robustly in the United States in the past decade
(economists can disagree about that statistic because there are different
ways of measuring and weighing economic inputs and outputs). If hes
right, it raises the possibility that poor job growth could be simply a result
of a sluggish economy. The sudden slowdown in job creation is a big
puzzle, he says, but theres not a lot of evidence its linked to computers.

To be sure, Autor says, computer technologies are changing the types of


jobs available, and those changes are not always for the good. At least
since the 1980s, he says, computers have increasingly taken over such
tasks as bookkeeping, clerical work, and repetitive production jobs in
manufacturingall of which typically provided middle-class pay. At the
same time, higher-paying jobs requiring creativity and problem-solving
skills, often aided by computers, have proliferated. So have low-skill jobs:
demand has increased for restaurant workers, janitors, home health aides,
and others doing service work that is nearly impossible to automate. The
result, says Autor, has been a polarization of the workforce and a
hollowing out of the middle classsomething that has been happening in
numerous industrialized countries for the last several decades. But that is
very different from saying technology is affecting the total number of jobs,
he adds. Jobs can change a lot without there being huge changes in
employment rates.

Whats more, even if todays digital technologies are holding down job
creation, history suggests that it is most likely a temporary, albeit painful,
shock; as workers adjust their skills and entrepreneurs create opportunities
based on the new technologies, the number of jobs will rebound. That, at
least, has always been the pattern. The question, then, is whether todays
computing technologies will be different, creating long-term involuntary
unemployment.

At least since the Industrial Revolution began in the 1700s, improvements


in technology have changed the nature of work and destroyed some types
of jobs in the process. In 1900, 41 percent of Americans worked in
agriculture; by 2000, it was only 2 percent. Likewise, the proportion of
Americans employed in manufacturing has dropped from 30 percent in the
postWorld War II years to around 10 percent todaypartly because of
increasing automation, especially during the 1980s.
While such changes can be painful for workers whose skills no longer
match the needs of employers, Lawrence Katz, a Harvard economist, says
that no historical pattern shows these shifts leading to a net decrease in
jobs over an extended period. Katz has done extensive research on how
technological advances have affected jobs over the last few centuries
describing, for example, how highly skilled artisans in the mid-19th century
were displaced by lower-skilled workers in factories. While it can take
decades for workers to acquire the expertise needed for new types of
employment, he says, we never have run out of jobs. There is no long-
term trend of eliminating work for people. Over the long term, employment
rates are fairly stable. People have always been able to create new jobs.
People come up with new things to do.

Still, Katz doesnt dismiss the notion that there is something different about
todays digital technologiessomething that could affect an even broader
range of work. The question, he says, is whether economic history will
serve as a useful guide. Will the job disruptions caused by technology be
temporary as the workforce adapts, or will we see a science-fiction scenario
in which automated processes and robots with superhuman skills take over
a broad swath of human tasks? Though Katz expects the historical pattern
to hold, it is genuinely a question, he says. If technology disrupts
enough, who knows what will happen?

Dr. Watson

To get some insight into Katzs question, it is worth looking at how todays
most advanced technologies are being deployed in industry. Though these
technologies have undoubtedly taken over some human jobs, finding
evidence of workers being displaced by machines on a large scale is not all
that easy. One reason it is difficult to pinpoint the net impact on jobs is that
automation is often used to make human workers more efficient, not
necessarily to replace them. Rising productivity means businesses can do
the same work with fewer employees, but it can also enable the businesses
to expand production with their existing workers, and even to enter new
markets.

Take the bright-orange Kiva robot, a boon to fledgling e-commerce


companies. Created and sold by Kiva Systems, a startup that was founded
in 2002 and bought by Amazon for $775 million in 2012, the robots are
designed to scurry across large warehouses, fetching racks of ordered
goods and delivering the products to humans who package the orders. In
Kivas large demonstration warehouse and assembly facility at its
headquarters outside Boston, fleets of robots move about with seemingly
endless energy: some newly assembled machines perform tests to prove
theyre ready to be shipped to customers around the world, while others
wait to demonstrate to a visitor how they can almost instantly respond to
an electronic order and bring the desired product to a workers station.

A warehouse equipped with Kiva robots can handle up to four times as


many orders as a similar unautomated warehouse, where workers might
spend as much as 70 percent of their time walking about to retrieve goods.
(Coincidentally or not, Amazon bought Kiva soon after a press report
revealed that workers at one of the retailers giant warehouses often
walked more than 10 miles a day.)

Despite the labor-saving potential of the robots, Mick Mountz, Kivas


founder and CEO, says he doubts the machines have put many people out
of work or will do so in the future. For one thing, he says, most of Kivas
customers are e-commerce retailers, some of them growing so rapidly they
cant hire people fast enough. By making distribution operations cheaper
and more efficient, the robotic technology has helped many of these
retailers survive and even expand. Before founding Kiva, Mountz worked at
Webvan, an online grocery delivery company that was one of the 1990s
dot-com eras most infamous flameouts. He likes to show the numbers
demonstrating that Webvan was doomed from the start; a $100 order cost
the company $120 to ship. Mountzs point is clear: something as mundane
as the cost of materials handling can consign a new business to an early
death. Automation can solve that problem.
Meanwhile, Kiva itself is hiring. Orange balloonsthe same color as the
robotshover over multiple cubicles in its sprawling office, signaling that
the occupants arrived within the last month. Most of these new employees
are software engineers: while the robots are the companys poster boys, its
lesser-known innovations lie in the complex algorithms that guide the
robots movements and determine where in the warehouse products are
stored. These algorithms help make the system adaptable. It can learn, for
example, that a certain product is seldom ordered, so it should be stored in
a remote area.

Though advances like these suggest how some aspects of work could be
subject to automation, they also illustrate that humans still excel at certain
tasksfor example, packaging various items together. Many of the
traditional problems in roboticssuch as how to teach a machine to
recognize an object as, say, a chairremain largely intractable and are
especially difficult to solve when the robots are free to move about a
relatively unstructured environment like a factory or office.

Techniques using vast amounts of computational power have gone a long


way toward helping robots understand their surroundings, but John
Leonard, a professor of engineering at MIT and a member of its Computer
Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), says many familiar
difficulties remain. Part of me sees accelerating progress; the other part of
me sees the same old problems, he says. I see how hard it is to do
anything with robots. The big challenge is uncertainty. In other words,
people are still far better at dealing with changes in their environment and
reacting to unexpected events.

For that reason, Leonard says, it is easier to see how robots could
work with humans than on their own in many applications. People and
robots working together can happen much more quickly than robots simply
replacing humans, he says. Thats not going to happen in my lifetime at a
massive scale. The semiautonomous taxi will still have a driver.

One of the friendlier, more flexible robots meant to work with humans is
Rethinks Baxter. The creation of Rodney Brooks, the companys founder,
Baxter needs minimal training to perform simple tasks like picking up
objects and moving them to a box. Its meant for use in relatively small
manufacturing facilities where conventional industrial robots would cost too
much and pose too much danger to workers. The idea, says Brooks, is to
have the robots take care of dull, repetitive jobs that no one wants to do.
Its hard not to instantly like Baxter, in part because it seems so eager to
please. The eyebrows on its display rise quizzically when its puzzled; its
arms submissively and gently retreat when bumped. Asked about the claim
that such advanced industrial robots could eliminate jobs, Brooks answers
simply that he doesnt see it that way. Robots, he says, can be to factory
workers as electric drills are to construction workers: It makes them more
productive and efficient, but it doesnt take jobs.

The machines created at Kiva and Rethink have been cleverly designed and
built to work with people, taking over the tasks that the humans often dont
want to do or arent especially good at. They are specifically designed to
enhance these workers productivity. And its hard to see how even these
increasingly sophisticated robots will replace humans in most
manufacturing and industrial jobs anytime soon. But clerical and some
professional jobs could be more vulnerable. Thats because the marriage of
artificial intelligence and big data is beginning to give machines a more
humanlike ability to reason and to solve many new types of problems.

Even if the economy is only going through a transition, it is an extremely


painful one for many.

In the tony northern suburbs of New York City, IBM Research is pushing
super-smart computing into the realms of such professions as medicine,
finance, and customer service. IBMs efforts have resulted in Watson, a
computer system best known for beating human champions on the game
show Jeopardy! in 2011. That version of Watson now sits in a corner of a
large data center at the research facility in Yorktown Heights, marked with
a glowing plaque commemorating its glory days. Meanwhile, researchers
there are already testing new generations of Watson in medicine, where
the technology could help physicians diagnose diseases like cancer,
evaluate patients, and prescribe treatments.

IBM likes to call it cognitive computing. Essentially, Watson uses artificial--


intelligence techniques, advanced natural-language processing and
analytics, and massive amounts of data drawn from sources specific to a
given application (in the case of health care, that means medical journals,
textbooks, and information collected from the physicians or hospitals using
the system). Thanks to these innovative techniques and huge amounts of
computing power, it can quickly come up with advicefor example, the
most recent and relevant information to guide a doctors diagnosis and
treatment decisions.
Despite the systems remarkable ability to make sense of all that data, its
still early days for Dr. Watson. While it has rudimentary abilities to learn
from specific patterns and evaluate different possibilities, it is far from
having the type of judgment and intuition a physician often needs. But IBM
has also announced it will begin selling Watsons services to customer-
support call centers, which rarely require human judgment thats quite so
sophisticated. IBM says companies will rent an updated version of Watson
for use as a customer service agent that responds to questions from
consumers; it has already signed on several banks. Automation is nothing
new in call centers, of course, but Watsons improved capacity for natural-
language processing and its ability to tap into a large amount of data
suggest that this system could speak plainly with callers, offering them
specific advice on even technical and complex questions. Its easy to see it
replacing many human holdouts in its new field.

Digital Losers

The contention that automation and digital technologies are partly


responsible for todays lack of jobs has obviously touched a raw nerve for
many worried about their own employment. But this is only one
consequence of what Brynjolfsson and McAfee see as a broader trend. The
rapid acceleration of technological progress, they say, has greatly widened
the gap between economic winners and losersthe income inequalities that
many economists have worried about for decades. Digital technologies tend
to favor superstars, they point out. For example, someone who creates a
computer program to automate tax preparation might earn millions or
billions of dollars while eliminating the need for countless accountants.

New technologies are encroaching into human skills in a way that is


completely unprecedented, McAfee says, and many middle-class jobs are
right in the bulls-eye; even relatively high-skill work in education, medicine,
and law is affected. The middle seems to be going away, he adds. The
top and bottom are clearly getting farther apart. While technology might
be only one factor, says McAfee, it has been an underappreciated one,
and it is likely to become increasingly significant.

Not everyone agrees with Brynjolfsson and McAfees conclusions


particularly the contention that the impact of recent technological change
could be different from anything seen before. But its hard to ignore their
warning that technology is widening the income gap between the tech-
savvy and everyone else. And even if the economy is only going through a
transition similar to those its endured before, it is an extremely painful one
for many workers, and that will have to be addressed somehow. Harvards
Katz has shown that the United States prospered in the early 1900s in part
because secondary education became accessible to many people at a time
when employment in agriculture was drying up. The result, at least through
the 1980s, was an increase in educated workers who found jobs in the
industrial sectors, boosting incomes and reducing inequality. Katzs lesson:
painful long-term consequences for the labor force do not follow inevitably
from technological changes.

Brynjolfsson himself says hes not ready to conclude that economic


progress and employment have diverged for good. I dont know whether
we can recover, but I hope we can, he says. But that, he suggests, will
depend on recognizing the problem and taking steps such as investing
more in the training and education of workers.

We were lucky and steadily rising productivity raised all boats for much of
the 20th century, he says. Many people, especially economists, jumped to
the conclusion that was just the way the world worked. I used to say that if
we took care of productivity, everything else would take care of itself; it
was the single most important economic statistic. But thats no longer true.
He adds, Its one of the dirty secrets of economics: technology progress
does grow the economy and create wealth, but there is no economic law
that says everyone will benefit. In other words, in the race against the
machine, some are likely to win while many others lose.

Credits: Noma Bar (Illustration); Data from Bureau of Labor Statistics


(Productivity, Output, GDP Per Capita); International Federation of Robotics;
CIA World Factbook (GDP by Sector), Bureau of Labor Statistics (Job
Growth, Manufacturing Employment); D. Autor and D. Dorn, U.S. Census,
American Community Survey, and Department of Labor (Change in
Employment and Wages by Skill, Routine Jobs)

Source: http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/515926/how-technology-is-destroying-
jobs/
The future of jobs: The onrushing wave
Previous technological innovation has always delivered more long-run
employment, not less. But things can change

The Economist | Jan 18th 2014 | From the print edition

IN 1930, when the world was sufferingfrom a bad attack of economic


pessimism, John Maynard Keynes wrote a broadly optimistic essay,
Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren. It imagined a middle way
between revolution and stagnation that would leave the said grandchildren
a great deal richer than their grandparents. But the path was not without
dangers.

One of the worries Keynes admitted was a new disease: technological


unemploymentdue to our discovery of means of economising the use of
labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour. His
readers might not have heard of the problem, he suggestedbut they were
certain to hear a lot more about it in the years to come.

For the most part, they did not. Nowadays, the majority of economists
confidently wave such worries away. By raising productivity, they argue,
any automation which economises on the use of labour will increase
incomes. That will generate demand for new products and services, which
will in turn create new jobs for displaced workers. To think otherwise has
meant being tarred a Ludditethe name taken by 19th-century textile
workers who smashed the machines taking their jobs.
For much of the 20th century, those arguing that technology brought ever
more jobs and prosperity looked to have the better of the debate. Real
incomes in Britain scarcely doubled between the beginning of the common
era and 1570. They then tripled from 1570 to 1875. And they more than
tripled from 1875 to 1975. Industrialisation did not end up eliminating the
need for human workers. On the contrary, it created employment
opportunities sufficient to soak up the 20th centurys exploding population.
Keyness vision of everyone in the 2030s being a lot richer is largely
achieved. His belief they would work just 15 hours or so a week has not
come to pass.

When the sleeper wakes

Yet some now fear that a new era of automation enabled by ever more
powerful and capable computers could work out differently. They start from
the observation that, across the rich world, all is far from well in the world
of work. The essence of what they see as a work crisis is that in rich
countries the wages of the typical worker, adjusted for cost of living, are
stagnant. In America the real wage has hardly budged over the past four
decades. Even in places like Britain and Germany, where employment is
touching new highs, wages have been flat for a decade. Recent research
suggests that this is because substituting capital for labour through
automation is increasingly attractive; as a result owners of capital have
captured ever more of the worlds income since the 1980s, while the share
going to labour has fallen.

At the same time, even in relatively egalitarian places like Sweden,


inequality among the employed has risen sharply, with the share going to
the highest earners soaring. For those not in the elite, argues David
Graeber, an anthropologist at the London School of Economics, much of
modern labour consists of stultifying bullshit jobslow- and mid-level
screen-sitting that serves simply to occupy workers for whom the economy
no longer has much use. Keeping them employed, Mr Graeber argues, is
not an economic choice; it is something the ruling class does to keep
control over the lives of others.

Be that as it may, drudgery may soon enough give way to frank


unemployment. There is already a long-term trend towards lower levels of
employment in some rich countries. The proportion of American adults
participating in the labour force recently hit its lowest level since 1978, and
although some of that is due to the effects of ageing, some is not. In a
recent speech that was modelled in part on Keyness Possibilities, Larry
Summers, a former American treasury secretary, looked at employment
trends among American men between 25 and 54. In the 1960s only one in
20 of those men was not working. According to Mr Summerss
extrapolations, in ten years the number could be one in seven.

This is one indication, Mr Summers says, that technical change is


increasingly taking the form of capital that effectively substitutes for
labour. There may be a lot more for such capital to do in the near future.
A 2013 paper by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, of the University
of Oxford, argued that jobs are at high risk of being automated in 47% of
the occupational categories into which work is customarily sorted. That
includes accountancy, legal work, technical writing and a lot of other white-
collar occupations.

Answering the question of whether such automation could lead to


prolonged pain for workers means taking a close look at past experience,
theory and technological trends. The picture suggested by this evidence is
a complex one. It is also more worrying than many economists and
politicians have been prepared to admit.

The lathe of heaven

Economists take the relationship between innovation and higher living


standards for granted in part because they believe history justifies such a
view. Industrialisation clearly led to enormous rises in incomes and living
standards over the long run. Yet the road to riches was rockier than is often
appreciated.

In 1500 an estimated 75% of the British labour force toiled in agriculture.


By 1800 that figure had fallen to 35%. When the shift to manufacturing got
under way during the 18th century it was overwhelmingly done at small
scale, either within the home or in a small workshop; employment in a
large factory was a rarity. By the end of the 19th century huge plants in
massive industrial cities were the norm. The great shift was made possible
by automation and steam engines.

Industrial firms combined human labour with big, expensive capital


equipment. To maximise the output of that costly machinery, factory
owners reorganised the processes of production. Workers were given one
or a few repetitive tasks, often making components of finished products
rather than whole pieces. Bosses imposed a tight schedule and strict
worker discipline to keep up the productive pace. The Industrial Revolution
was not simply a matter of replacing muscle with steam; it was a matter of
reshaping jobs themselves into the sort of precisely defined components
that steam-driven machinery neededcogs in a factory system.

The way old jobs were done changed; new jobs were created. Joel Mokyr,
an economic historian at Northwestern University in Illinois, argues that the
more intricate machines, techniques and supply chains of the period all
required careful tending. The workers who provided that care were well
rewarded. As research by Lawrence Katz, of Harvard University, and Robert
Margo, of Boston University, shows, employment in manufacturing
hollowed out. As employment grew for highly skilled workers and
unskilled workers, craft workers lost out. This was the loss to which the
Luddites, understandably if not effectively, took exception.
With the low-skilled workers far more numerous, at least to begin with, the
lot of the average worker during the early part of this great industrial and
social upheaval was not a happy one. As Mr Mokyr notes, life did not
improve all that much between 1750 and 1850. For 60 years, from 1770 to
1830, growth in British wages, adjusted for inflation, was imperceptible
because productivity growth was restricted to a few industries. Not until the
late 19th century, when the gains had spread across the whole economy,
did wages at last perform in line with productivity (see chart 1).

Along with social reforms and new political movements that gave voice to
the workers, this faster wage growth helped spread the benefits of
industrialisation across wider segments of the population. New investments
in education provided a supply of workers for the more skilled jobs that
were by then being created in ever greater numbers. This shift continued
into the 20th century as post-secondary education became increasingly
common.

Claudia Goldin, an economist at Harvard University, and Mr Katz have


written that workers were in a race between education and technology
during this period, and for the most part they won. Even so, it was not until
the golden age after the second world war that workers in the rich world
secured real prosperity, and a large, property-owning middle class came to
dominate politics. At the same time communism, a legacy of
industrialisations harsh early era, kept hundreds of millions of people
around the world in poverty, and the effects of the imperialism driven by
European industrialisation continued to be felt by billions.

The impacts of technological change take their time appearing. They also
vary hugely from industry to industry. Although in many simple economic
models technology pairs neatly with capital and labour to produce output,
in practice technological changes do not affect all workers the same way.
Some find that their skills are complementary to new technologies. Others
find themselves out of work.

Take computers. In the early 20th century a computer was a worker, or a


room of workers, doing mathematical calculations by hand, often with the
end point of one persons work the starting point for the next. The
development of mechanical and electronic computing rendered these
arrangements obsolete. But in time it greatly increased the productivity of
those who used the new computers in their work.

Many other technical innovations had similar effects. New machinery


displaced handicraft producers across numerous industries, from textiles to
metalworking. At the same time it enabled vastly more output per person
than craft producers could ever manage.

Player piano

For a task to be replaced by a machine, it helps a great deal if, like the
work of human computers, it is already highly routine. Hence the demise of
production-line jobs and some sorts of book-keeping, lost to the robot and
the spreadsheet. Meanwhile work less easily broken down into a series of
stereotyped taskswhether rewarding, as the management of other
workers and the teaching of toddlers can be, or more of a grind, like tidying
and cleaning messy work placeshas grown as a share of total
employment.

But the race aspect of technological change means that such workers
cannot rest on their pay packets. Firms are constantly experimenting with
new technologies and production processes. Experimentation with different
techniques and business models requires flexibility, which is one critical
advantage of a human worker. Yet over time, as best practices are worked
out and then codified, it becomes easier to break production down into
routine components, then automate those components as technology
allows.

If, that is, automation makes sense. As David Autor, an economist at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), points out in a 2013 paper,
the mere fact that a job can be automated does not mean that it will be;
relative costs also matter. When Nissan produces cars in Japan, he notes, it
relies heavily on robots. At plants in India, by contrast, the firm relies more
heavily on cheap local labour.

Even when machine capabilities are rapidly improving, it can make sense
instead to seek out ever cheaper supplies of increasingly skilled labour.
Thus since the 1980s (a time when, in America, the trend towards post-
secondary education levelled off) workers there and elsewhere have found
themselves facing increased competition from both machines and cheap
emerging-market workers.
Such processes have steadily and relentlessly squeezed labour out of the
manufacturing sector in most rich economies. The share of American
employment in manufacturing has declined sharply since the 1950s, from
almost 30% to less than 10%. At the same time, jobs in services soared,
from less than 50% of employment to almost 70% (see chart 2). It was
inevitable, therefore, that firms would start to apply the same
experimentation and reorganisation to service industries.

A new wave of technological progress may dramatically accelerate this


automation of brain-work. Evidence is mounting that rapid technological
progress, which accounted for the long era of rapid productivity growth
from the 19th century to the 1970s, is back. The sort of advances that
allow people to put in their pocket a computer that is not only more
powerful than any in the world 20 years ago, but also has far better
software and far greater access to useful data, as well as to other people
and machines, have implications for all sorts of work.
The case for a highly disruptive period of economic growth is made by Erik
Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, professors at MIT, in The Second
Machine Age, a book to be published later this month. Like the first great
era of industrialisation, they argue, it should deliver enormous benefits
but not without a period of disorienting and uncomfortable change. Their
argument rests on an underappreciated aspect of the exponential growth in
chip processing speed, memory capacity and other computer metrics: that
the amount of progress computers will make in the next few years is
always equal to the progress they have made since the very beginning. Mr
Brynjolfsson and Mr McAfee reckon that the main bottleneck on innovation
is the time it takes society to sort through the many combinations and
permutations of new technologies and business models.

A startling progression of inventions seems to bear their thesis out. Ten


years ago technologically minded economists pointed to driving cars in
traffic as the sort of human accomplishment that computers were highly
unlikely to master. Now Google cars are rolling round California driver-free
no one doubts such mastery is possible, though the speed at which fully
self-driving cars will come to market remains hard to guess.

Brave new world

Even after computers beat grandmasters at chess (once thought highly


unlikely), nobody thought they could take on people at free-form games
played in natural language. Then Watson, a pattern-recognising
supercomputer developed by IBM, bested the best human competitors in
Americas popular and syntactically tricksy general-knowledge quiz show
Jeopardy! Versions of Watson are being marketed to firms across a range
of industries to help with all sorts of pattern-recognition problems. Its
acumen will grow, and its costs fall, as firms learn to harness its abilities.

The machines are not just cleverer, they also have access to far more data.
The combination of big data and smart machines will take over some
occupations wholesale; in others it will allow firms to do more with fewer
workers. Text-mining programs will displace professional jobs in legal
services. Biopsies will be analysed more efficiently by image-processing
software than lab technicians. Accountants may follow travel agents and
tellers into the unemployment line as tax software improves. Machines are
already turning basic sports results and financial data into good-enough
news stories.

Jobs that are not easily automated may still be transformed. New data-
processing technology could break cognitive jobs down into smaller and
smaller tasks. As well as opening the way to eventual automation this could
reduce the satisfaction from such work, just as the satisfaction of making
things was reduced by deskilling and interchangeable parts in the 19th
century. If such jobs persist, they may engage Mr Graebers bullshit
detector.

Being newly able to do brain work will not stop computers from doing ever
more formerly manual labour; it will make them better at it. The designers
of the latest generation of industrial robots talk about their creations as
helping workers rather than replacing them; but there is little doubt that
the technology will be able to do a bit of bothprobably more than a bit. A
taxi driver will be a rarity in many places by the 2030s or 2040s. That
sounds like bad news for journalists who rely on that most reliable source
of local knowledge and prejudicebut will there be many journalists left to
care? Will there be airline pilots? Or traffic cops? Or soldiers?
There will still be jobs. Even Mr Frey and Mr Osborne, whose research
speaks of 47% of job categories being open to automation within two
decades, accept that some jobsespecially those currently associated with
high levels of education and high wageswill survive (see table). Tyler
Cowen, an economist at George Mason University and a much-read blogger,
writes in his most recent book, Average is Over, that rich economies
seem to be bifurcating into a small group of workers with skills highly
complementary with machine intelligence, for whom he has high hopes,
and the rest, for whom not so much.

And although Mr Brynjolfsson and Mr McAfee rightly point out that


developing the business models which make the best use of new
technologies will involve trial and error and human flexibility, it is also the
case that the second machine age will make such trial and error easier. It
will be shockingly easy to launch a startup, bring a new product to market
and sell to billions of global consumers (see article). Those who create or
invest in blockbuster ideas may earn unprecedented returns as a result.

In a forthcoming book Thomas Piketty, an economist at the Paris School of


Economics, argues along similar lines that America may be pioneering a
hyper-unequal economic model in which a top 1% of capital-owners and
supermanagers grab a growing share of national income and accumulate
an increasing concentration of national wealth. The rise of the middle-
classa 20th-century innovationwas a hugely important political and
social development across the world. The squeezing out of that class could
generate a more antagonistic, unstable and potentially dangerous politics.

The potential for dramatic change is clear. A future of widespread


technological unemployment is harder for many to accept. Every great
period of innovation has produced its share of labour-market doomsayers,
but technological progress has never previously failed to generate new
employment opportunities.
The productivity gains from future automation will be real, even if they
mostly accrue to the owners of the machines. Some will be spent on goods
and servicesgolf instructors, household help and so onand most of the
rest invested in firms that are seeking to expand and presumably hire more
labour. Though inequality could soar in such a world, unemployment would
not necessarily spike. The current doldrum in wages may, like that of the
early industrial era, be a temporary matter, with the good times about to
roll (see chart 3).

These jobs may look distinctly different from those they replace. Just as
past mechanisation freed, or forced, workers into jobs requiring more
cognitive dexterity, leaps in machine intelligence could create space for
people to specialise in more emotive occupations, as yet unsuited to
machines: a world of artists and therapists, love counsellors and yoga
instructors.
Such emotional and relational work could be as critical to the future as
metal-bashing was in the past, even if it gets little respect at first. Cultural
norms change slowly. Manufacturing jobs are still often treated as
betterin some vague, non-pecuniary waythan paper-pushing is. To
some 18th-century observers, working in the fields was inherently more
noble than making gewgaws.

But though growth in areas of the economy that are not easily automated
provides jobs, it does not necessarily help real wages. Mr Summers points
out that prices of things-made-of-widgets have fallen remarkably in past
decades; Americas Bureau of Labour Statistics reckons that today you
could get the equivalent of an early 1980s television for a twentieth of its
then price, were it not that no televisions that poor are still made. However,
prices of things not made of widgets, most notably college education and
health care, have shot up. If people lived on widgets alone goods whose
costs have fallen because of both globalisation and technologythere
would have been no pause in the increase of real wages. It is the increase
in the prices of stuff that isnt mechanised (whose supply is often under the
control of the state and perhaps subject to fundamental scarcity) that
means a pay packet goes no further than it used to.

So technological progress squeezes some incomes in the short term before


making everyone richer in the long term, and can drive up the costs of
some things even more than it eventually increases earnings. As innovation
continues, automation may bring down costs in some of those stubborn
areas as well, though those dominated by scarcitysuch as houses in
desirable placesare likely to resist the trend, as may those where the
state keeps market forces at bay. But if innovation does make health care
or higher education cheaper, it will probably be at the cost of more jobs,
and give rise to yet more concentration of income.
The machine stops

Even if the long-term outlook is rosy, with the potential for greater wealth
and lots of new jobs, it does not mean that policymakers should simply sit
on their hands in the mean time. Adaptation to past waves of progress
rested on political and policy responses. The most obvious are the massive
improvements in educational attainment brought on first by the institution
of universal secondary education and then by the rise of university
attendance. Policies aimed at similar gains would now seem to be in order.
But as Mr Cowen has pointed out, the gains of the 19th and 20th centuries
will be hard to duplicate.

Boosting the skills and earning power of the children of 19th-century


farmers and labourers took little more than offering schools where they
could learn to read, write and do algebra. Pushing a large proportion of
college graduates to complete graduate work successfully will be harder
and more expensive. Perhaps cheap and innovative online education will
indeed make new attainment possible. But as Mr Cowen notes, such
programmes may tend to deliver big gains only for the most conscientious
students.

Another way in which previous adaptation is not necessarily a good guide


to future employment is the existence of welfare. The alternative to joining
the 19th-century industrial proletariat was malnourished deprivation. Today,
because of measures introduced in response to, and to some extent on the
proceeds of, industrialisation, people in the developed world are provided
with unemployment benefits, disability allowances and other forms of
welfare. They are also much more likely than a bygone peasant to have
savings. This means that the reservation wagethe wage below which a
worker will not accept a jobis now high in historical terms. If
governments refuse to allow jobless workers to fall too far below the
average standard of living, then this reservation wage will rise steadily, and
ever more workers may find work unattractive. And the higher it rises, the
greater the incentive to invest in capital that replaces labour.

Everyone should be able to benefit from productivity gainsin that, Keynes


was united with his successors. His worry about technological
unemployment was mainly a worry about a temporary phase of
maladjustment as society and the economy adjusted to ever greater levels
of productivity. So it could well prove. However, society may find itself
sorely tested if, as seems possible, growth and innovation deliver
handsome gains to the skilled, while the rest cling to dwindling employment
opportunities at stagnant wages.

Source: http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21594264-previous-technological-innovation-
has-always-delivered-more-long-run-employment-not-less
How Technology Wrecks the Middle
Class
By DAVID H. AUTOR and DAVID DORN
August 24, 2013 2:35 pmAugust 24, 2013 2:35 pm

Photo

Robot arms welded a vehicle on the assembly line at a General Motors


plant in Lansing, Mich., in 2010.Credit Bill Pugliano/Getty Images

In the four years since the Great Recession officially ended, the
productivity of American workers those lucky enough to have jobs
has risen smartly. But the United States still has two million fewer jobs
than before the downturn, the unemployment rate is stuck at levels not seen
since the early 1990s and the proportion of adults who are working is four
percentage points off its peak in 2000.
This job drought has spurred pundits to wonder whether a profound
employment sickness has overtaken us. And from there, its only a short
leap to ask whether that illness isnt productivity itself. Have we
mechanized and computerized ourselves into obsolescence?

Are we in danger of losing the race against the machine, as the M.I.T.
scholarsErik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee argue in a recent book?
Are we becoming enslaved to our robot overlords, as the journalist
Kevin Drum warned in Mother Jones? Do smart machines threaten us
with long-term misery, as the economists Jeffrey D. Sachs and Laurence
J. Kotlikoff prophesied earlier this year? Have we reached the end of
labor, as Noah Smith laments in The Atlantic?
Of course, anxiety, and even hysteria, about the adverse effects of
technological change on employment have a venerable history. In the early
19th century a group of English textile artisans calling themselves the
Luddites staged a machine-trashing rebellion. Their brashness earned them
a place (rarely positive) in the lexicon, but they had legitimate reasons for
concern.

Economists have historically rejected what we call the lump of labor


fallacy: the supposition that an increase in labor productivity inevitably
reduces employment because there is only a finite amount of work to do.
While intuitively appealing, this idea is demonstrably false. In 1900, for
example, 41 percent of the United States work force was in agriculture. By
2000, that share had fallen to 2 percent, after the Green Revolution
transformed crop yields. But the employment-to-population ratio rose over
the 20th century as women moved from home to market, and the
unemployment rate fluctuated cyclically, with no long-term increase.

Labor-saving technological change necessarily displaces workers


performing certain tasks thats where the gains in productivity come
from but over the long run, it generates new products and services that
raise national income and increase the overall demand for labor. In 1900,
no one could foresee that a century later, health care, finance, information
technology, consumer electronics, hospitality, leisure and entertainment
would employ far more workers than agriculture. Of course, as societies
grow more prosperous, citizens often choose to work shorter days, take
longer vacations and retire earlier but that too is progress.

So if technological advances dont threaten employment, does that mean


workers have nothing to fear from smart machines? Actually, no and
heres where the Luddites had a point. Although many 19th-century
Britons benefited from the introduction of newer and better automated
looms unskilled laborers were hired as loom operators, and a growing
middle class could now afford mass-produced fabrics its unlikely that
skilled textile workers benefited on the whole.

Fast-forward to the present. The multi-trillionfold decline in the cost of


computing since the 1970s has created enormous incentives for employers
to substitute increasingly cheap and capable computers for expensive labor.
These rapid advances which confront us daily as we check in at airports,
order books online, pay bills on our banks Web sites or consult our
smartphones for driving directions have reawakened fears that workers
will be displaced by machinery. Will this time be different?

A starting point for discussion is the observation that although computers


are ubiquitous, they cannot do everything. A computers ability to
accomplish a task quickly and cheaply depends upon a human
programmers ability to write procedures or rules that direct the machine to
take the correct steps at each contingency. Computers excel at routine
tasks: organizing, storing, retrieving and manipulating information, or
executing exactly defined physical movements in production processes.
These tasks are most pervasive in middle-skill jobs like bookkeeping,
clerical work and repetitive production and quality-assurance jobs.

Logically, computerization has reduced the demand for these jobs, but it
has boosted demand for workers who perform nonroutine tasks that
complement the automated activities. Those tasks happen to lie on opposite
ends of the occupational skill distribution.

At one end are so-called abstract tasks that require problem-solving,


intuition, persuasion and creativity. These tasks are characteristic of
professional, managerial, technical and creative occupations, like law,
medicine, science, engineering, advertising and design. People in these
jobs typically have high levels of education and analytical capability, and
they benefit from computers that facilitate the transmission, organization
and processing of information.

On the other end are so-called manual tasks, which require situational
adaptability, visual and language recognition, and in-person interaction.
Preparing a meal, driving a truck through city traffic or cleaning a hotel
room present mind-bogglingly complex challenges for computers. But they
are straightforward for humans, requiring primarily innate abilities like
dexterity, sightedness and language recognition, as well as modest training.
These workers cant be replaced by robots, but their skills are not scarce,
so they usually make low wages.

Computerization has therefore fostered a polarization of employment, with


job growth concentrated in both the highest- and lowest-paid occupations,
while jobs in the middle have declined. Surprisingly, overall employment
rates have largely been unaffected in states and cities undergoing this rapid
polarization. Rather, as employment in routine jobs has ebbed,
employment has risen both in high-wage managerial, professional and
technical occupations and in low-wage, in-person service occupations.

So computerization is not reducing the quantity of jobs, but rather


degrading the quality of jobs for a significant subset of workers. Demand
for highly educated workers who excel in abstract tasks is robust, but the
middle of the labor market, where the routine task-intensive jobs lie, is
sagging. Workers without college education therefore concentrate in
manual task-intensive jobs like food services, cleaning and security
which are numerous but offer low wages, precarious job security and few
prospects for upward mobility. This bifurcation of job opportunities has
contributed to the historic rise in income inequality.

HOW can we help workers ride the wave of technological change rather
than be swamped by it? One common recommendation is that citizens
should invest more in their education. Spurred by growing demand for
workers performing abstract job tasks, the payoff for college and
professional degrees has soared; despite its formidable price tag, higher
education has perhaps never been a better investment. But it is far from a
comprehensive solution to our labor market problems. Not all high school
graduates let alone displaced mid- and late-career workers are
academically or temperamentally prepared to pursue a four-year college
degree. Only 40 percent of Americans enroll in a four-year college after
graduating from high school, and more than 30 percent of those who enroll
do not complete the degree within eight years.

The good news, however, is that middle-education, middle-wage jobs are


not slated to disappear completely. While many middle-skill jobs are
susceptible to automation, others demand a mixture of tasks that take
advantage of human flexibility. To take one prominent example, medical
paraprofessional jobs radiology technician, phlebotomist, nurse
technician are a rapidly growing category of relatively well-paid,
middle-skill occupations. While these paraprofessions do not typically
require a four-year college degree, they do demand some postsecondary
vocational training.

These middle-skill jobs will persist, and potentially grow, because they
involve tasks that cannot readily be unbundled without a substantial drop
in quality. Consider, for example, the frustration of calling a software firm
for technical support, only to discover that the technician knows nothing
more than the standard answers shown on his or her computer screen
that is, the technician is a mouthpiece reading from a script, not a problem-
solver. This is not generally a productive form of work organization
because it fails to harness the complementarities between technical and
interpersonal skills. Simply put, the quality of a service within any
occupation will improve when a worker combines routine (technical) and
nonroutine (flexible) tasks.

Following this logic, we predict that the middle-skill jobs that survive will
combine routine technical tasks with abstract and manual tasks in which
workers have a comparative advantage interpersonal interaction,
adaptability and problem-solving. Along with medical paraprofessionals,
this category includes numerous jobs for people in the skilled trades and
repair: plumbers; builders; electricians; heating, ventilation and air-
conditioning installers; automotive technicians; customer-service
representatives; and even clerical workers who are required to do more
than type and file. Indeed, even as formerly middle-skill occupations are
being deskilled, or stripped of their routine technical tasks (brokering
stocks, for example), other formerly high-end occupations are becoming
accessible to workers with less esoteric technical mastery (for example, the
work of the nurse practitioner, who increasingly diagnoses illness and
prescribes drugs in lieu of a physician). Lawrence F. Katz, a labor
economist at Harvard, memorably called those who fruitfully combine the
foundational skills of a high school education with specific vocational
skills the new artisans.

The outlook for workers who havent finished college is uncertain, but not
devoid of hope. There will be job opportunities in middle-skill jobs, but not
in the traditional blue-collar production and white-collar office jobs of the
past. Rather, we expect to see growing employment among the ranks of the
new artisans: licensed practical nurses and medical assistants; teachers,
tutors and learning guides at all educational levels; kitchen designers,
construction supervisors and skilled tradespeople of every variety; expert
repair and support technicians; and the many people who offer personal
training and assistance, like physical therapists, personal trainers, coaches
and guides. These workers will adeptly combine technical skills with
interpersonal interaction, flexibility and adaptability to offer services that
are uniquely human.

David H. Autor is a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute


of Technology. David Dorn is an assistant professor of economics at the
Center for Monetary and Financial Studies in Madrid.
A version of this article appears in print on 08/25/2013, on page of the
NewYork edition with the headline: How Technology Wrecks the Middle
Class.

Source: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/24/how-technology-wrecks-the-middle-
class/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0
As machines take on more human
work, what is left for us?
AUGUST 15, 2014

By Drew DeSilver1 comment

For decades, labor economists have sought to quantify and predict the the impact of computer
technology on both current and future employment, a subject that a new Pew Research Center
report probed with a survey of nearly 1,900 experts. Computers had typically been thought of as
best suited for jobs that involve routine, repetitive tasks that can easily be reduced to lines of
code. But with computer-controlled devices and systems already capable of doing far more than
projected even a few years ago, many experts now see more complex jobs coming into play.
The first approach is perhaps summed up by MIT economist David Autor and David Dorn, an
economist at Spains CEMFI institute, whove done much of the spade work in this line of
research. They wrote in a 2013 paper: The adoption of computers substitutes for low-skill
workers performing routine tasks such as bookkeeping, clerical work, and repetitive production
and monitoring activities which are readily computerized because they follow precise, well-
defined procedures.
Consequently, Autor and Dorn say, computerization has been a major contributor to the
hollowing-out of middle-skilled, middle-wage jobs and a corresponding rise in employment at
both the high and low ends of the skills spectrum. To quantify this, the researchers developed an
index of routine task intensity, or RTI. The higher an occupations RTI, the more its
characterized by routine tasks with relatively little manual labor or abstract reasoning involved.
Dorn, in a separate paper, said RTI could be interpreted as an occupations potential
susceptibility to displacement by automation.

A look at the highest- and lowest-ranking nonfarm occupations by RTI seems to bear that out. Of
the 15 occupations with the highest RTI scores, only one (cashiers) accounted for a higher share
of U.S. employment in 2005 than it did in 1980, while 10 of the 15 lowest-RTI occupations grew
as a share of total employment over that timespan.

But as computing devices have become both more powerful and ever-more woven into the fabric
of our lives, theyve steadily moved into tasks that only a few years ago would have been thought
safely in the humans only zone. In 2004, for instance, Frank Levy and Richard
Murnane wrote that executing a left turn across oncoming traffic involves so many factors that it
is hard to imagine discovering the set of rules that can replicate [a] drivers behavior. Today,
Google is rapidly making self-driving cars a reality.
Last year, two Oxford researchers proposed a new way of estimating how vulnerable different
occupations are to future technological advances. The researchers, Carl Benedikt Frey and
Michael Osborne, focused on the extent to which occupations involve three types of tasks
perception and manipulation, creative intelligence and social intelligence that, they argue, are
least likely to be fully and successfully automated within the next few decades. The more a job
involves such tasks, the less susceptible it is to computerization.
Credit: Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne

Frey and Osborne analyzed 702 occupations this way, sorting them into high, medium and low
risk of computerization. They concluded that 47% of total U.S. employment is in the high risk
category, including most workers in transportation and logistics occupations, office and
administrative support occupations, and production workers. Among the jobs at the highest risk
for computerization: telemarketers, title examiners, insurance underwriters, watch repairers and
tax preparers.

Much of the near-term risk of computerization, Frey and Osborne conclude, will be borne by low-
skill, low-wage workers a reversal of the hollowing out phenomenon that has characterized
the computing age up to now. As technology races ahead, they write, low-skill workers will
reallocate to tasks that are non-susceptible to computerization i.e., tasks requiring creative and
social intelligence. For workers to win the race, however, they will have to acquire creative and
social skills.

Topics: Emerging Technology Impacts, Work and Employment

Source: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/08/15/as-machines-take-on-more-human-
work-whats-left-for-us/
Experts Have No Idea If Robots Will
Steal Your Job
by Walter Frick | 9:37 AM August 8, 2014

Experts disagree about the future. That might seem unextraordinary, but its the conclusion of
a new survey on robots from Pew, and its more significant than it sounds. For all the talk of
robots stealing jobs, 2,551 experts surveyed were deeply divided over the following question:
Will networked, automated, artificial intelligence (AI) applications and robotic devices
have displaced more jobs than they have created by 2025?

48% agreed with this pessimistic take, while a thin majority was more optimistic.

Perhaps the most obvious takeaway is that a grain of salt is needed whenever prognosticators
claim to know which jobs will be automated and which wont. These exercises are valuable in that
they help us think through the role of automation in society, but the truth is we simply dont know
how many jobs of which kinds will be automated when.
To those in fear of being replaced by automation, the fact that experts are divided may seem like
consolation unfortunately, its anything but.

Instead, the second takeaway is that the skeptics are gaining ground. Conventional wisdom has
long held that, while technology may displace workers in the short-term, it does not reduce
employment over the long-term.

This encouraging bit of historical consensus was illustrated in a poll of economists taken this
February by the University of Chicago. Only 2% of those surveyed believe that automation has
reduced employment in the U.S.

Against this backdrop, Pews 50-50 split is more troubling. Some of the gap may reflect
economists general optimism, but more than that, it signals the recognition that this wave of
technological disruption could in fact be different.

Historically, fears of technology-driven unemployment have failed to materialize both because


demand for goods and services continued to rise, and because workers learned new skills and so
found new work. We might need fewer workers to produce food than we once did, but weve
developed appetites for bigger houses, faster cars, and more elaborate entertainment that more
than make up for the difference. Farmworkers eventually find employment producing those things,
and society moves on.

In their recent book, The Second Machine Age, MITs Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee
challenge the assumption that this pattern will repeat itself, arguing that the sheer pace of todays
digital change threatens to leave many workers behind.
What if this process [of skill adjustment] takes a decade? And what if by then, technology
has changed again? Once one concedes that it takes time for workers and
organizations to adjust to technical change, then it becomes apparent that accelerating
technical change can lead to widening gaps and increasing possibilities for technological
unemployment.

Much of the book is dedicated to making the case that technical change is accelerating, due to
Moores Law, the observation that computing power roughly doubles every 18 months.

Several Pew respondents experts from a wide range of technology-related fields echoed
this line of thinking. As technology consultant and futurist Bryan Alexander put it:
The education system is not well positioned to transform itself to help shape graduates
who can race against the machines. Not in time, and not at scale. Autodidacts will do
well, as they always have done, but the broad masses of people are being prepared for
the wrong economy.

There are counterpoints, of course, like those made recently here at HBR by Boston Universitys
James Bessen, who argues that technology eventually boosts demand for even less educated
workers. Numerous Pew respondents agree. Internet pioneer and Google VP Vint Cerf put it
succinctly:
Historically, technology has created more jobs than it destroys and there is no reason to
think otherwise in this case. Someone has to make and service all these advanced
devices.

Economist Tyler Cowen summed up his own thoughts on the subject, writing on his blog that:
The law of comparative advantage has not been repealed. Machines take away some
jobs and create others, while producing more output overall.

But not unlike Moores Law, comparative advantage the insight that workers shift to the tasks to
which they are best suited is not set in stone. Of the former, Brynjolfsson and McAfee write:

Moores Law is very different from the laws of physics that govern thermodynamics or
Newtonian classical mechanics. Those laws describe how the universe works; theyre
true no matter what we do. Moores Law, in contrast, is a statement about the work of the
computer industrys engineers and scientists; its an observation about how constant and
successful their efforts have been.

Comparative advantage is more than just observation its one of the most enduring findings of
social science. It describes how economies work in a wide range of circumstances, but it is
subject to revision. If the entire structure of the economy changes, thanks to technology, so too
might the rules of comparative advantage.

In their book, Brynjolfsson and McAfee highlight how predictions made in 2004 on the basis of
comparative advantage failed to predict even todays division of labor between people and
machines. Economists Frank Levy and Richard Murnane theorized that computers would handle
arithmetic and rule-based work, while humans would be required for pattern recognition like
driving as well as communication. Today, self-driving cars are well on their way to adoption and
speech recognition is embedded in every smartphone.

The list of things that machines can do better than humans continues to grow, confounding our
predictions. The jobs we think are safe may not be, and the ones we fear well lose may be safer
than we think.

Source: http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/08/experts-have-no-idea-if-robots-will-steal-your-job/
Automation Alone Is Not Killing Jobs
APRIL 5, 2014

Photo

Credit John Hersey

Although the labor market report on Friday showed modest job growth, employment
opportunities remain stubbornly low in the United States, giving new prominence to the old notion
that automation throws people out of work.
Back in the 19th century, steam power and machinery took away many traditional jobs, though
they also created new ones. This time around, computers, smart software and robots are seen as
the culprits. They seem to be replacing many of the remaining manufacturing jobs and
encroaching on service-sector jobs, too.

Driverless vehicles and drone aircraft* are no longer science fiction, and over time, they may
eliminate millions of transportation jobs. Many other examples of automatable jobs are discussed
in The Second Machine Age, a book by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, and in my own
book, Average Is Over. The upshot is that machines are often filling in for our smarts, not just for
our brawn and this trend is likely to grow.
How afraid should workers be of these new technologies? There is reason to be skeptical of the
assumption that machines will leave humanity without jobs. After all, history has seen many
waves of innovation and automation, and yet as recently as 2000, the rate of unemployment was
a mere 4 percent. There are unlimited human wants, so there is always more work to be done.
The economic theory of comparative advantage suggests that even unskilled workers can gain
from selling their services, thereby liberating the more skilled workers for more productive tasks.

Nonetheless, technologically related unemployment or, even worse, the phenomenon of


people falling out of the labor force altogether because of technology may prove a tougher
problem this time around.

Labor markets just arent as flexible these days for workers, especially for men at the bottom end
of the skills distribution. Through much of the 20th century, workers moved out of agriculture and
into manufacturing jobs. A high school diploma and a basic willingness to work were often
enough, at least for white men, because the technologies of those times often relied on
accompanying manual labor.

Many of the new jobs today are in health care and education, where specialized training and
study are required. Across the economy, a college degree is often demanded where a high
school degree used to suffice. Its now common for a fire chief to be expected to have a masters
degree, and to perform a broader variety of business-related tasks that were virtually unheard-of
in earlier generations. All of these developments mean a disadvantage for people who dont like
formal education, even if they are otherwise very talented. Its no surprise that current
unemployment has been concentrated among those with lower education levels.
There is also a special problem for some young men, namely those with especially restless
temperaments. They arent always well-suited to the new class of service jobs, like greeting
customers or taking care of the aged, which require much discipline or sometimes even a
subordination of will. The law is yet another source of labor market inflexibility: The number of
jobs covered by occupational licensing continues to rise and is almost one-third of the work force.
We dont need such laws for, say, barbers or interior designers, although they are commonly on
the books.
Many expanding economic sectors are not very labor-intensive, be they tech fields like online
retailing or even new mining and extraction industries. That means its harder for the rate of job
creation to keep up with the rate of job destruction, because a given amount of economic growth
isnt bringing as many jobs.

A new paper by Alan B. Krueger, Judd Cramer and David Cho of Princeton has documented that
the nation now appears to have a permanent class of long-term unemployed, who probably cant
be helped much by monetary and fiscal policy. Its not right to describe these people as thrown
out of work by machines, because the causes involve complex interactions of technology,
education and market demand. Still, many people are finding this new world of work harder to
navigate.
Sometimes, the problem in labor markets takes the form of underemployment rather than outright
joblessness. Many people, especially the young, end up with part-time and temporary service
jobs or perhaps a combination of them. A part-time retail worker, for example, might also write
for a friends website and walk dogs for wealthier neighbors. These workers often arent climbing
career ladders that build a brighter or more secure future.
Many of these labor market problems were brought on by the financial crisis and the collapse of
market demand. But it would be a mistake to place all the blame on the business cycle. Before
the crisis, for example, business executives and owners didnt always know who their worst
workers were, or didnt want to engage in the disruptive act of rooting out and firing them. So long
as sales were brisk, it was easier to let matters lie. But when money ran out, many businesses
had to make the tough decisions and the axes fell. The financial crisis thus accelerated what
would have been a much slower process.

Subsequently, some would-be employers seem to have discriminated against workers who were
laid off in the crash. These judgments werent always fair, but that stigma isnt easily overcome,
because a lot of employers in fact had reason to identify and fire their less productive workers.

In a nutshell, what were facing isnt your grandfathers unemployment problem. It does have
something to do with modern technology, and it will be with us for some time.

TYLER COWEN is professor of economics at George Mason University.

A version of this article appears in print on April 6, 2014, on page BU6 of the New York
edition with the headline: Automation Alone Isnt Killing Jobs.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/06/business/automation-alone-isnt-killing-jobs.html
March 25, 2013

Robots Aren't the Problem: It's Us


By Richard Florida

Swikar Patel for The Chronicle Review

E veryone has an opinion about technology. Depending on whom you ask, it

will either: a) Liberate us from the drudgery of everyday life, rescue us from
disease and hardship, and enable the unimagined flourishing of human civilization;
or b) Take away our jobs, leave us broke, purposeless, and miserable, and cause
civilization as we know it to collapse.
The first strand of thinking reflects "techno-utopianism"the conviction that
technology paves a clear and unyielding path to progress and the good life. George
F. Gilder's 2000 book Telecosm envisions a radiant future of unlimited bandwidth
in which "liberated from hierarchies that often waste their time and talents, people
will be able to discover their most productive roles." Wired's Kevin Kelly believes
that, although robots will take away our jobs, they will also "help us discover new
jobs for ourselves, new tasks that expand who we are. They will let us focus on
becoming more human than we were."
The technology critic Evgeny Morozov dubs today's brand of technology
utopianism "solutionism," a deep, insidious kind of technological determinism in
which issues can be minimized by supposed technological fixes (an extreme
example he gives is how a set of "smart" contact lenses edit out the homeless from
view). We latch on to such fixes because they enable us to displace our anxieties
about our real-world distress, the New Yorker staff writer George Packer explains:
"When things don't work in the realm of stuff, people turn to the realm of bits."
Morozov points to a future in which dictators and governments increasingly use
technology (and robots) to watch over us; Packer worries about "the politics of
dissolution," the way information technology erodes longstanding identities and
atomizes us.

O n the other side stand the growing ranks of "techno-pessimists." Some say

that technology's influence is greatly overstated, seeing instead a petering out of


innovation and its productive forces. According to the George Mason University
economist Tyler Cowen, for example, America and other advanced nations are
entering a prolonged "great stagnation," in which the low-hanging fruits of
technological advance have largely been exhausted and the rates of innovation and
economic growth have slowed. Robert J. Gordon, an economist at Northwestern
University, adds additional statistical ammunition to this argument in his much-
talked-about paper, "Is U.S. Economic Growth Over?" Computers and
biotechnology have advanced at a phenomenal clip, he demonstrates, but they have
created only a short-lived revival of growth. Today's innovations do not have the
kind of world-shaking impact that the invention of modern plumbing or the
introduction of self-propelled vehicles did (they're "pipsqueaks" by comparison)
and they are more likely to eliminate than to add jobs.
Another techno-dystopian strand sees the "rise of the robots" as a threat not just to
blue-collar jobs but also to knowledge work. "To put it bluntly, it seems that high-
skill occupations can be mechanised and outsourced in much the same way as car
manufacturing and personal finance," Tom Campbell, a novelist and consultant in
the creative sector, blogs, pointing to commercial software that already analyzes
legal contracts or diagnoses disease.
The dustbin of history is littered with dire predictions about the effects of
technology. They frequently come to the fore in periods in which economies and
societies are in the throes of sweeping transformationlike today.

During the upheaval of the Great Depression, the late Harvard University
economist Alvin Hansen, often called the "American Keynes," said that our
economy had exhausted its productive forces and was doomed to a fate of secular
stagnation in which the government would be constantly called upon to stoke
demand to keep it moving. Of course we now know from the detailed historical
research of Alexander J. Field that the 1930s were, in the title of his 2008 paper,
"The Most Technologically Progressive Decade of the Century," when
technological growth outpaced the high-tech innovations of the 1980s, 1990s, and
2000s.

As the late economist of innovation Christopher Freeman long ago argued,


innovation slows down during the highly speculative times leading up to great
economic crises, only to surge forward as the crisis turns toward recovery. While
data are scanty so early into our current recovery cycle, a new, detailed report from
the Brookings Institution shows a considerable uptick in patented innovations over
the last couple of years,

More than 100 years ago, during an earlier depression, H.G. Wells's The Time
Machine imagined a distant future when humanity had degenerated into two
separate speciesthe dismal Morlock, the descendants of the working class, who
lived underground and manned the machines, and the ethereal Eloi, their former
masters, who had devolved to a state of abject dependency. A little more than half a
century later, Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano depicted a world in which "any man
who cannot support himself by doing a job better than a machine" is shipped off to
the military or assigned to do menial work under the auspices of the government.

T his either-or dualism misses the point, for two reasons.

The obvious one is the simple fact that technology cuts both ways. In their
influential book Race Against the Machine, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee,
both at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, point out how technology
eliminates some jobs but upgrades others. Similarly, Scott Winship, an economist
with Brookings, recently noted in an article in Forbes that "technological
development will surely eliminate some specific jobs." But the productivity gains
from those developments, he added, "will lower the cost of goods and produce
more discretionary income, which people will use to pay other people to do things
for them, creating new jobs."

What economists dub "skill-biased technical change" is, in fact, causing both the
elimination of formerly good-paying manufacturing jobs and the creation of high-
paying new jobs. As a result, work is being bifurcatedinto high-pay, high-skill
knowledge jobs and low-pay, low-skill service jobs.

The second and more fundamental problem with the debate between utopians and
dsytopians is that technology, while important, is not deterministic. As the great
theorists of technology, economic growth, and social development Karl Marx and
Joseph Schumpeter arguedand modern students of technological innovation have
documentedtechnology is embedded in the larger social and economic structures,
class relationships, and institutions that we create. All the way back in 1858,
in Grundrisse, Marx noted: "Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways,
electric telegraphs, self-acting mules, etc. These are products of human industry."
Technological innovation, he went on "indicates to what degree general social
knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the
conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the
general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it."

In his landmark 1990 book on economic progress from classical antiquity to the
present, The Lever of Riches, the economic historian Joel Mokyr also
distinguishes homo economicus, "who makes the most of what nature permits him
to have," from the Promethean homo creativus, who "rebels against nature's
dictates." He places emphasis, like Schumpeter perhaps, on human beings'
underlying creative ability to mold technology by building institutions, forging
social compacts, making work better, building societies. Technology does not force
us into a preordained path but enables us, or, more to the point, forces us to make
choices about what we want our future to be like.
We do not live in the world of The Matrix or the Terminator movies, where the
machines are calling the shots. When all is said and done, human beings are
technology's creators, not its passive objects. Our key tasks during economic and
social transformations are to build new institutions and new social structures and to
create and put into effect public policies that leverage technology to improve our
jobs, strengthen our economy and society, and generate broader shared prosperity.

O ur current period is less defined by either the "end of technology" or the

"rise of robots" than by deep and fundamental transformations of our economy,


society, and class structures. The kinds of work that Americans do have changed
radically over the course of the last two centuries, particularly during major
economic crises, like the Panic and Depression of 1873; the Great Depression of
the 1930s; the Crash of 2008. Each shift has been hugely disruptive, eliminating
previously dominant forms of employment and work, while generating entirely new
ones.
In 1800 more than 40 percent of American workers made their livings in farming,
fishing, or forestry, while less than 20 percent worked in manufacturing,
transportation, and the like. By 1870, the share of workers engaged in those
agricultural jobs had dropped to just 10 percent; during those same decades, the
ranks of blue-collar manufacturing workers had risen to more than 60 percent.

That was not a smooth change, to say the very least. Rural people fearedoften
rightlythat their friends and family who were moving to the cities were dooming
themselves to immiseration and brutal exploitation, working 16-hour days for
subsistence wages. When labor began to organize for better conditions,
management hit back hardin some cases unleashing armed Pinkertons on strikers.
The Panic of 1873 and the Long Depression that followed it began as a banking
crisis precipitated by insolvent mortgages and complex speculative instruments,
and it brought the entire economy to a virtual standstill. But the technological
advances perfected and put into place during that decade of economic stagnation
everything from telephones to streetcarscreated the powerhouse industrial cities
that underpinned a vast industrial expansion.
The battles, and the terrible working conditions, continued well into the 1930s,
when my father went to work in a Newark, N.J., factory at age 13. Nine people in
his family had to workboth parents, both grandparents, and several siblingsto
make one family wage. The Industrial Revolution had been going on for more than
a century before a new social compact was forgeda product of worker militancy,
enlightened self-interest on the part of owners and management, and pressure from
the governmentthat brought safety, dignity, and security to blue-collar work. It
was this compact that buttressed the great age of productivity in the post-World
War II era. When he returned from the war, my father's job in the very same factory
he had previously worked in had been transformed into a good, high-paying
occupation, the kind we pine for today, which enabled him to buy a home and
support a family.

But beginning around 1950, when Kurt Vonnegut was working for General Electric
and writing Player Piano, the share of working-class jobs began to fall precipitously.
It wasn't just automation that was doing itour whole economy was shifting again,
and our society was changing with it. There was the civil-rights movement and
later the anti-war youth movement, feminism, and gay rights. People began to rebel
against the enforced conformity of corporate life. A new ethos was bubbling up, in
Haight-Ashbury and Woodstock through music and art and fashion, and in Silicon
Valley with computers and high tech. Some economists began to talk about how
the industrial economy was transitioning to a service economy; others, like the
sociologist Daniel Bell, saw the rise of a postindustrial economy powered by
science, technology, and a new technocratic elite. The pioneering theorist Peter
Drucker dubbed it a "knowledge economy."

Almost a decade ago, in my book The Rise of the Creative Class, I called it a
"creative economy," because creativity, not knowledge, has become the
fundamental factor of production. Our economy uses technology, but it is not
principally powered by it. Its motive force is creativity. Economic and social
progress result from the interweaving of several distinctive, related strands of
creativity: innovative or technological creativity, entrepreneurship or economic
creativity, and civic or artistic creativity.
Our current economic circumstance is not simply the
product of faceless technology; it is also informed and
structured by socioeconomic class.
The key organizing unit of the postindustrial creative economy is no longer the
factory or the giant corporation. It is our communities and our cities. Cities are the
organizing or pivot point for creativity, its great containers and connectors. Unlike
the services we produce, the technologies we create, or the knowledge and
information that is poured into our heads, creativity is an attribute we all share. It is
innate in every human being. But it is also social, it lives among us: We make each
other creative. With their dense social networks, cities push people together and
increase the kinetic energy among them. If the powerhouse cities of the industrial
era depended on their locations near natural resources or transportation centers, our
great cities today turn on the people who live in themthey are where we combine
and recombine our talents to generate new ideas and innovations.

Like the Industrial Revolution, the rise of the knowledge-driven, creative economy
has transformed the composition of the work force, with harrowing consequences.
The picture is brutally clear: Working-class employment has declined by 50 percent
in the last half century. Blue-collar workers made up 40 percent of the work force
in 1980; they are just 20 percent of the work force today. In just the one decade
between 2000 and 2010, the United States shed more than 5.7 million production
jobs.

As the working class, like the agricultural class before it, has faded, two new
socioeconomic classes have arisen: the creative class (40 million strong in the
United States, roughly a third of the work force) and the even larger service class
(60 million strong and growing, about 45 percent of the work force). If the creative
class is growing, the service class is growing even faster. Last year the U.S. Bureau
of Labor Statistics published a list of the fastest-growing occupational categories in
the United States, projected out to 2020. Most of the top 10 were in the service
sector. The two fastest-growing jobs, which are expected to grow by roughly 70
percent by 2020, were personal-care aides and home health aides. The former,
which pays a median of just $19,640, will add more than 600,000 jobs; the latter,
which pays $20,560, will grow by more than 700,000 jobs. There was only one
clearly creative-class job in the top 10biomedical engineer (an $81,540-a-year
job).

Our current economic circumstance is not simply the product of faceless


technology; it is also informed and structured by socioeconomic class. The creative
class is highly skilled and educated; it is also well paid. Creative-class jobs average
more than $70,000 in wages and salaries; some pay much more. Service-class jobs
in contrast average just $29,000. The service class makes up 45 percent of the work
force but earns just a third of wages and salaries in the United States; the creative
class accounts for just a third of employment but earns roughly half the wages and
salaries.

The divide goes even deeper. Add the ranks of the unemployed, the displaced, and
the disconnected to those tens of millions of low-wage service workers, and the
population of postindustrialism's left-behinds surges to as many as two-thirds of all
Americans. That produces a much larger, and perhaps more permanent, version of
the economic, social, and cultural underclass that Michael Harrington long ago
dubbed "the other America." Only this time, it's a clear majority.

The effects of class extend far beyond our work and incomes to virtually every
facet of our social lives. One class is not only wealthier and better educated than the
other, its members are also healthier, happier, live in places with better services and
resources of all sorts, and they pass their advantages on to their children.

T o blame technology for all this is to miss the point. Instead of looking at

technology as a simple artifact that imposes its will on us, we should look at how it
affects our social and economic arrangementsand how we have failed to adapt
them to our circumstances.
If nearly half the jobs that our economy is creating are low paid and unskilled and
roughly two-thirds of our population is being left behind, then we need to create
new and better social and economic structures that improve those jobs. That means
more than just raising wages (though that has to be done), but actively and
deliberately improving jobs. We did it before with factory jobs, like my father's.
We have to do it again, this time with low-wage, low-skill service work. That isn't
charity or an entitlementit's tapping workers' intelligence and capabilities as a
source of innovation and productivity improvements.

My own research, and that of others, has identified two sets of skills that increase
pay and improve work. Cognitive skills have to do with intelligence and knowledge;
social skills involve the ability to mobilize resources, manage teams, and create
value. These skills literally define high-wage knowledge work: When you add
more of them to that work, wages go up. But here's the thing: When those skills are
added to service work, wages increase at a steeper rate than they do in creative jobs.

Paying workers better also offers substantial benefits to the companies that employ
them and to the economy writ large. While that may seem counterintuitive, detailed
academic research backs it up. Zeynep Ton of MIT's Sloan School of Management
argues that the notion that keeping wages low is the long way to achieve low prices
and high profits is badly mistaken: "The problem with this very common view is
that it assumes that an employee working at a low-cost retailer can't be any more
productive than he or she currently is. It's mindless work so it doesn't matter who
does it. If that were true, then it really wouldn't make any sense to pay retail
workers any more than the least you can get away with."

In a study published in the Harvard Business Review, Ton finds that the retail
companies that invest the most in their lowest paid workers "also have the lowest
prices in their industries, solid financial performance, and better customer service
than their competitors." As she has pointed out, the companies and jobs provide a
powerful model that can be extended to other service-based jobs like those in
hospitals, restaurants, banks, and hotels. Upgrading service jobs in this way, she
says, "could help provide the kind of economic boost the economy needs."

We can't simply write off the tens of millions of workers who toil in dead-end
service jobs, or the millions more who are unemployed and underemployed. The
key to a broadly shared prosperity lies in new social and economic arrangements
that more fully engage, not ignore and waste, the creative talents of all of our
people.
Just as we forged a new social compact in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s that saw
manufacturing workers as a source of productivity improvements and raised their
wages to create a broad middle class to power growth, we need a new social
compacta Creative Compactthat extends the advantages of our emergent
knowledge and creative economy to a much broader range of workers. Every job
must be "creatified"; we must harness the creativity of every single human being.

I'm optimistic, even in the face of deep economic, social, and political troubles,
because the logic of our future economic development turns on the further
development and engagement of human creativity.

As in the past, it won't be technology that defines our economic future. It will be
our ability to mold it to our needs.

Richard Florida is director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of


Toronto's Rotman School of Management and Global Research Professor at New
York University.

Source: https://chronicle.com/article/Robots-Arent-the-Problem-/138007/
When Robots Take All the Work, What
Will Be Left for Us to Do?
BY MARCUS WOHLSEN
08.08.14 |
6:30 AM |

Getty

Robots have loomed over the future of labor for decadesat least since robotic arms started
replacing auto workers on the assembly line in the early 1960s. Optimists say that more robots
will lead to greater productivity and economic growth, while pessimists complain that huge swaths
of the labor force will see their employment options automated out of existence.
Each has a point, but theres another way to look at this seemingly inevitable trend. What if both
are right? As robots start doing more and more of the work humans used to do, and doing it so
much more efficiently than we ever did, what if the need for jobs disappears altogether? What if
the robots end up producing more than enough of everything that everyone needs?

The redefinition of work itself is one of the most intriguing possibilities imagined in a recent Pew
Research report on the future of robots and jobs. Certainly, the prospect of a robot-powered,
post-scarcity future of mandatory mass leisure feels like a far-off scenario, and an edge case
even then. In the present, ensuring that everyone has enough often seems harder for humans to
accomplish than producing enough in the first place. But assuming a future that looks more
like Star Trek than Blade Runner, a lot of people could end up with a lot more time on their hands.
In that case, robots wont just be taking our jobs; theyll be forcing us to confront a major
existential dilemma: if we didnt have to work anymore, what would we do?
The answer is both a quantitative and qualitative exercise in defining what makes human
intelligence distinct from the artificial kind, a definition that seems to keep getting narrower. And in
the end, we might figure out that a job-free roboticized future is even scarier than it sounds.

Humanity as a Service
One prevailing answer kind of dodges the question, but it also seems like one of the most
plausible outcomes. Maybe many jobs cant be automated in the first place. Several respondents
canvassed by Pew believe that the need for human labor will persist because so many of our
basic human qualities are hard to code. Truth be told, computers are not very smart. All they are
is giant calculators, game designer and author Celia Pearce told Pew. They can do things that
require logic, but logic is only one part of the human mind.

Humans will continue to be useful workers, the argument goes, because of things like empathy,
creativity, judgment, and critical thinking. Consider the all-too-common experience of calling
customer service reps whose employers force them to follow a scripta kind of pseudo-
automation. When made to follow a decision tree the way a computer would, all four of those
qualities are sucked out of the interactionno opportunity to exercise creativity, empathy,
judgment, or critical thinkingand the service provided tends to stink.

Detecting complaints is an AI problem. Sending the complaints to the correct customer service
entity is an AI problem, said one unnamed Pew respondent described as a university professor
and researcher. But customer service itself is a human problem.

Overall, the kinds of jobs that respondents predicted humans would still be needed to do involved
interactions with other people. Healthcare, education, and caring for the elderly and children were
all seen as occupations that would still require a human touch. Those areas in which human
compassion is important will be less changed than those where compassion is less or not
important, said Herb Lin, chief scientist on the Computer Science and Telecommunications
Board at the National Academies of Science.
Future job options may even extend beyond the caring professions to include work that the fluid
integration of body and mind still make it most efficient for humans to perform. In a piece looking
at the instant gratification economy of same-day delivery, San Francisco UPS driver Rafael
Monterrosa tells Recode hes not worried about a self-driving car taking his place. As far as
delivery goes, you still need someone to carry something up the stairs.

No Job Required
Still, as industries from manufacturing to transportation to journalism are overtaken by artificial
intelligence, the sheer number of new openings in more human service-related industries may not
keep up with the number of other jobs lost. That could be leave many, many people out of work.
But it could also end up changing our economy in enormous ways.
Traditionally, increased productivity correlates with economic growth and job growth, since
human labor has historically driven production. A robot workforce, however, can drive productivity
and growth on its own, eliminating jobs in the process. That might mean the whole paradigm of
exchanging labor for pay starts to break down. If we persist in the view that the dividends from
robots increased productivity should accrue to robot owners, well definitely come to a future
where there arent enough owners of robots to buy all the things that robots make, Cory
Doctorow wrote in a recent Boing Boing post.
Doctorow suggests the possibility that robot-driven abundance could undermine the need for
markets as we know them. Property rights may be a way of allocating resources when there
arent enough of them to go around, but when automation replaces labor altogether and theres
lots of everything, do we still need it? Assuming a post-scarcity system of distribution evolves to
peacefully and fairly share the fruits of robot-driven post-scarcity production, jobs as we know
them might not just become unnecessarythey might stop making sense altogether.

The idea that robots could make employment itself optional may sound fantastic. No more work!
But the end result could be more, not less angst. Wed still have to find our place among the
robots, except this time without work as a guidepost for defining a sense of purpose. By
eliminating the need for people to work, robots would free us up to focus on what really makes us
human. The scariest possibility of all is that only then do we figure out what really makes us
human is work.

Source: http://www.wired.com/2014/08/when-robots-take-all-the-work-whatll-be-left-for-us-to-do/
Video: Humans Need Not Apply
By CGP Grey

Published on Aug 13, 2014

Discuss this video: http://www.reddit.com/r/CGPGrey/comments/2dfh5v/humans_need_not_apply/

http://www.CGPGrey.com/

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
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